Day 8 - Wellington, Weta + Mt Victoria

When we rose to the blustery day the hotel was still standing - despite the night winds threatening to blow the whole place away. We ran across the road to a popular café for breakfast before heading to the nearby Miramar peninsula to first Weta Workshops the site of the props design and digital effects in The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit.

Mum hit the gift shop while we waited for our tour to start, and soon we were going through the worship, learning how the props are designed and made, before looking at original props, armour and prosthetics from LOTR and The Hobbit, as well as other films such as District 9, The Chronicles of Narnia, and the upcoming Thunderbirds. As we left the peninsula we stopped off at an Art Deco cinema in Miramar with a statue of Gandalf outside. We went inside for a coffee, and discovered that the interior of the cinema and it's upper salon was amazing, being in a high Art Deco style with a sci-fi theme of androids and robots that were reminiscent of the film Metropolis.

After taking some photos, and nearly being blow into the harbour by the tremendous winds, we were back in the car and heading up to the summit (or Carpark nearby) of Mt Victoria, in the heart of Wellington. Amazingly there are houses almost all the way up to the top, with residences as close as 100 metres to the summit. It wasn't as windy up here as we anticipated, so we took in the 360 degree views of the city before heading back down the narrow dog leg roads that twist their way down the mountainside. 

Once we were back in the city we visited the national gallery, known as 'Te Papa'. The gallery has a large collection of exhibits on Maori culture, which was very interesting. There was also an ANZAC exhibit about Gallipoli as seen through the eyes of a number of people (colonels, infantry, nurses etc) each of which was sculpted in super human size (courtesy of Weta Workshops). It was a very detailed and sobering experience, after which we were all too tired to do anymore sight seeing.

We rested before heading to dinner nearby at an Asian hawker market, with steaks of all kinds of food - from Vietnamese to Armenian.  Mick and I ended the day with a late night stroll along Cuba Street, where we discovered a whole new range of eateries that we had totally missed. We resolved to come back to Wellington in future as we really liked its quirky charm and every, despite the windy weather.